mistressofmuses

Quick picture of Berry Mad, lurking in the corner of her plant pot.

On Tuesday, we had a few errands to run, but spent most of the day at Hudson Gardens.

It was a little early, though it's been so warm it didn't feel like it should be, ha. They hadn't yet planted their annuals or put out any of the water plants, but there was still plenty to see, and it was a very nice day to walk around.


Crabapple blossoms against the sky.

Sixteen more pictures:

Lily of the valley.


A bushtit. They are so remarkably tiny, and the name remains so unfortunate!


Potentilla.


Honeybee on an allium.


Wild roses.


An iris.


Speedwell.


More irises.


Lilacs, which smelled wonderful.


These roses were such an intense red that my phone camera didn't want to believe it existed, ha.


Only a few of the flowers had this kind of yellow variegation, but it was neat.

We stopped and had a fancy coffee and split a pastry (banana bread) from the coffee shop down along the bike trail. Always nice.


The bee hives are more accessible again! Still behind their usual fence, of course, but last year they were trying to reestablish some of the grass and groundcover, so a lot of the grounds were off limits, including the view of the hives.

We'd been hoping for frogs, but alas. Mom and Taylor heard a lot of frogsong up in the mountains a few days before (on a Mother's Day hike), but nothing at the gardens, alas.

However...


There were so many tadpoles! Future frogs!

We took another break at the far end of the gardens, and split a can of boba tea. It was delicious, but had a couple silly things on the can:


Shack well! Precipitation may occur!

We spent a long time just sitting in the "cascades" area, listening to the water and talking. It was a lovely afternoon.


Across the 'mountain stream', a family of geese scrambling up the banks. They were so cute! And hungry. We watched the little goslings just going to town on some of the plants over there, haha.


I liked that there was grass and some small plants growing out of the top of one of the logs. I also rather liked the reflection of the trees.

After the gardens, we also stopped by Barnes and Noble. I had a couple of gift cards from Christmas and my birthday, and I was wanting to get Overgrowth, the new Mira Grant book.


Obviously, I found a few more books than that, as always.

Five Ways to Forgiveness was one of the Ursula K Le Guin books that wasn't included in that humble bundle of her work, so it'd been on my list. The other four books were on a "buy one, get one 50% off" horror table. I picked out A House With Good Bones, because I've heard good things about it, and Blood On Her Tongue because it sounds interesting and I was tempted by the cool cover design. (The bloody effect on the pages!) Alex picked out The Last House on Needless Street and The Reformatory, because those sounded the best to him. We'll add them to our shared TBR list, ha.

Just a handful of random pictures:

On Sunday evening I went over to my mom and Taylor's to hang out.


Same as last year, a baby bunny has picked my mom's patio to live on. Seems like a nicely sheltered spot to live!

For a little while, it was sitting on the patio chairs, which was cute, but I didn't get a picture.

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It rained pretty much all morning on Tuesday while I was over there.


This hummingbird was not terribly amused by it, but she hunkered down on the feeder for quite a while. (This is probably a female black-chinned hummingbird, since that's the male we were seeing around as well. Could be a broad-tailed, though; hard to tell them apart.)


And here she is sticking her tongue out, haha.


So round, when she's all fluffed up! And bonus finch on the neighbor's lights.

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And one pic of the dogs, being uncharacteristically cuddly, ha.

The weather on Monday was beautiful, so after the vet visit for the dogs, we wanted to go out for a walk. We did drop Cy off at home, since he'd already had more than enough of a day, haha.

Bella came back out with us, and this time we walked around the whole of the lake (a couple weeks ago she was tired after doing a quick partial walk around just one edge, so this meant she had a Very Big Day.)

It was wonderfully warm without being too hot. We saw lots of birds (though heard more than we saw), and then there were SO MANY TURTLES!


These flowers look and smell like the flowers of the plum thickets in our yard as a kid, but I don't think they're actually plums.


Turtle preview! In addition to all the usual slider-type turtles, it was a two snapping turtle day! Look at that impressive tail!

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I am very glad we went on a good walk in the nice weather. I hope we can keep it up!

Despite miserable cold and snow for a few days last week, it's finally starting to feel like things are tipping over into spring. (Not to say that we're done with snow; we probably aren't that lucky. But at least it's more like "spring, with occasional backslides to winter" instead of "winter with teasing hints of spring.")


This picture is from the very end of March, when some trees finally started blooming!

Today we got to go on a walk. Ended up being a little shorter than hoped, though Bella was tired by the end anyway, so maybe we need to work back up to longer walks anyway, ha.


Finally, flowers!

( Seven pictures, mostly turtles and birds: )

Monday was our last day in Arizona. Our flight was late in the afternoon again, so we still had some time to kill.

Taylor needed to work a half day, so got up super early. They worked in our hotel room for the first chunk of the morning.

Alex asked me to go to Starbucks and look for one of their Arizona mugs if I had a chance to. The nearest Starbucks was a mile or so away, so my mom agreed to go on a walk with me to go get some coffee and a souvenir mug, lol. They didn't have any Arizona mugs, but they did have a Phoenix one, so that's what Alex got, haha.


Little cactus beds in the hotel's courtyard. Not as exciting as all the cacti at the gardens, but I was still excited to see saguaros everywhere.

On the walk back to the hotel, my mom and I saw a cactus wren building a nest in a cholla!


We watched him for quite a while, flying off and coming back with more materials for the nest.

Two more of the wren:

A little after we got back it was checkout time. The resort was fully booked for Monday night, so didn't have any late checkout options. They did have storage for luggage, though. Taylor set up to finish their workday in one of the sort-of lounge sort-of restaurant areas. Mom and I hung out outside and just read or killed time on our phones. I think I fell asleep for a little while, ha.


There were flocks of grackles in the courtyard. They had lots to say and really hoped we had snacks for them to poach. (We did not.)


One of the bigger saguaros in the courtyard. (This one is just slightly visible in the first pic in this post - the second garden bed toward the top, but it's almost entirely obscured by the tree.) I do love how many of them have woodpecker nesting holes. We did see a few gila woodpeckers, I just never got a good pic!


And the little saguaros that are in danger of tipping over... this is how we keep them standing, I guess.

The flight back was fine. There was a lot of turbulence again, but we arrived fine. Taylor and I were across the aisle from each other, so we could at least make faces at each other about the screaming child. :|


Welcome back to DIA. I love you, luggage gargoyle.

It was miserably cold back in Denver. It was well worth the cost to park at one of the offsite indoor garages, since at least we didn't have to chip ice off the car. The drive back to my mom's sucked for a bit on the slick roads, but we made it. I picked up the rest of my stuff, and then she took me back home.

Didn't get home until pretty late, but it was nice to be back. <3

Last week Alex and I went back to Hudson Gardens, a free botanical garden. We went back in the spring, but at the time it was a little too early for a lot of the stuff we wanted to see. This time we were too late! But it was nice to go anyway.

The gardens are doing a seasonal event, "The Magic of the Jack-o-Lanterns" or something to that effect. It's a paid, ticketed event at night, but you can walk through the setup during the day as part of the regular free admission.

The Halloween setup is pretty cool - tons of carved (foam) pumpkins. (But pretty good realistic fake pumpkins!) Unfortunately, it does block a couple areas of the garden off even more than they already were. (This year they've roped some sections off for reseeding and to reestablish areas that have been eroded. I can't be mad about that, but it's sad not to be able to get to all the usual things. The event stuff ropes some of the things like the beehives off entirely, so you can't approach them at all.)

We were too late for some of the stuff I'd hoped to see, like the water lilies (which we were too early for in the spring), but the roses were having a fantastic second bloom! The single frost we had last month seems to have done away with the Japanese beetles that were devouring them earlier in the year, so they were doing great now!


Always love bees on flowers.


I also really liked this rose. The picture only sort of does justice to just how enormous it was!

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And there were the pumpkins! Like I mentioned above, they are foam pumpkins rather than real ones. They're good fakes, and it makes sense. If you want the displays to last the whole month, real ones certainly wouldn't!

Lots of the displays were things like pop culture figures that I didn't really care about too much, but some of them were really neat.


Edgar Allan Poe was certainly an appropriate choice, imo.

( Eleven more below the cut: )

On Monday we decided to go over to Pelican Pond (and there were pelicans!) We wanted somewhere we could do a short-ish walk with Bella, but also didn't want to have to go too far.


The sunflowers are doing very well right now. Plus a very nice bumblebee!


Grasshoppers, perched very perfectly on the top of some bent over teasel.

And one of the things I thought was the coolest:


An absolutely enormous wasp nest! It was HUGE, and just barely above head level to the side of the path. It was pretty active, with a lot of wasps coming and going, though they weren't at all aggressive. One started doing a really minor guard position once I'd been there for a minute, so I backed off.

(I almost texted a picture of the nest to my mom to ask her why she hadn't told me about it, since she walks there more often than we do, but I didn't. Then on Tuesday she texted me a picture of it, because that was the first day she'd seen it, haha.)

( Ten more pictures below the cut: )

It was a nice day, warm, but with a gentle breeze and enough cloud-cover to not feel too overwhelming. A bit more humid, though. Bella acted like she was DYING by the end of it, though it was about the same distance as her usual morning walks with Alex after they drop me off at work, lol. And of course after a power-nap in the car, she was ready to go-go-go again, ha.

On the 17th, we decided to head up to Dearfield. (The link goes to the National Park Service's page about the town, and has some neat historical photos that are worth looking at!)

Dearfield was a black homesteading community founded in 1910. The dustbowl ultimately destroyed the settlement's livelihood and it was functionally abandoned, leaving only a handful of structures.

Alex and I visited it when we still lived up in Greeley, but hadn't been there in probably thirteen or fourteen years. I'd heard there was renewed interest in preserving the site a few years back, with my old university using it as a field school site. There were some funds from the state's historical fund being put into it, and I think last year or the year before it was in the running to get some additional designations and funding, though I didn't hear the outcome of that bid. (Unfortunately, since I see no mention of that on the Park Service's page, I think it likely did not get the upgraded designation.)


This monument wasn't up the last time we had visited, but I believe it went up later that same year. A brief bit about the site's history. The collapsed building behind it is the lunchroom.


Here is one of the places where the restoration work is most obvious... or, at least that restoration work was begun.

The last time we came here, the house was still on its foundation, but has now been moved up and off, I assume so that the cellar and foundation can be excavated for anything of interest, and probably ultimately strengthened to ensure structural stability.
The first time we'd visited, that was the only building we were able to enter, though we only went in a very short way because there were parts that seemed unstable.

I think the building that has been pulled up from the foundation is O.T. Jackson's home (the founder of the settlement), though I'm not completely certain. The building behind it and to the left was also clearly a residence, and has a large workshop/garage attached in the back, so it's possible that was his home and the building up front was something else.

While I'm glad to see that they were at least obviously working on the site, nothing up here looked like it was happening currently, or even terribly recently. I hope none of the projects are abandoned and that the work continues soon.

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Continuing the walk through Hudson Gardens...


A very pretty late-blooming peony.


This was my favorite picture of the day! A bold jumping spider. She was quite big, and had the greenest sheen on her chelicerae that I've ever seen. She was very cool and so cute!

( The rest of the gardens (12 pictures below the cut) )

Part three of four! This time all of the animals we saw: bees, butterflies, birds, fish, etc!


A lovely frittilary!


A bee posing nicely on a rose.


Night heron! I assume this is the same one we see pretty frequently in the gardens. It wasn't in the Japanese garden this time, but along the little river area. It ran under the bridge as soon as it saw us coming.

( Fifteen more below the cut: )